PROLOGUE
Making of the Sword
The Dragon pored over a pile of steel scraps. Some of them were the latest carbon steel. Some looked hundreds of years old. There were leaf springs from ancient trucks, back when vehicles burned fossil fuels and used rubber tires. The springs lasted forever, long after the trucks, owners, and goods had turned to dust. There were pieces of old knives and axe heads, handles long gone.
Every so often he reached out and picked up a piece. The ones he kept, he stacked carefully together. Sometimes he used an ancient hand grinder to clean off rust and dirt. He had an open pan of solvent, and he submerged the best pieces in this to effect a final cleansing.
When the pile was big enough, he put the scraps in a canoe-shaped canister, fitting them together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, rotating them until he felt at peace. The canister itself was made of mild steel, and would be picked apart when the final billet was forged. This was the time-honored way of making canister Damascus, which allowed the forging of a blade using disparate metals.
When the canister was filled, he plugged the gaps with high-carbon steel powder and then covered the top with flux. Even though he was technically blind, his fingers moved unerringly because he could see the lines of the distortion field, the witchery physics of the djinn world, spheres of eldritch energy all around him, far more useful in the manipulation of steel than photons bouncing against a working retina.
His forge was a very simple gas-powered fire housed in a rectangle of ceramic bricks, hand-made from the clay on site. He could have heated the metal with his fingers, but the regular beat of the flames soothed him, and in any case he preferred to adhere as closely as possible to the old ways.
When he was satisfied with the canister’s weight and distribution, he spent a moment fiddling with the field, making sure each piece was aligned correctly so they would weld together nicely once molten. A good preparation saved a shitload of grief later on, and canister Damascus was fiddly and temperamental to begin with. Most people in his little blacksmith commune made stuff out of straight bar, either 1080 machine-tool steel or the more expensive carbon steels with nano structure, so-called new Wootz steel.
He preferred to work with junk metals. Anything else seemed like cheating. The new carbon steels were so hard and durable that they barely needed forging. You could grind a knife out of a bar and it would be fine with a half-hearted heat treatment. For that matter, you could print a katana on a hub machine on any street corner and it would probably be better than the real thing.
But the old ways of forging allowed him to align the molecules using the field, making internal patterns of carbon and iron that were, though unseen, fantastical works of art, art for the eyes of God, since no other djinn or man had his sight, eyes made custom by Givaras the Broken. At no small cost.
When he was sure everything was good, he welded the ends of the canister shut and then welded a piece of holding pipe to the end of the little box, so he could manipulate it easily. Of course, he could put his whole hand into the forge without risk, but he preferred not to advertise his abilities. People already gave him a wide berth.
He finally put the billet into the forge and took a breather as it turned orange. The lack of sparks was a good sign; it meant his welds were holding and air wasn’t getting into or out of his canister. When it was ready, he put it on the anvil and hammered it evenly, trying to make the interior pieces of molten steel into a solid welded piece. There were power tools he could use for this, but he liked the rhythm of hammer striking billet, and his field-enhanced body was far stronger than an ordinary human’s in any case.
When he felt that the billet was solid, he started hammering the edges, trying to peel off the soft metal of the canister. This was the really tricky part, determining whether the inside metal was welded together properly while also trying to remove the entirety of the canister metal, which was unsuitable for blade work.
The Dragon cheated, of course. His eyes could see the edges in the molten steel, and he ran his field over each weld with the lightest touch, locking each errant carbon atom into stable cubes of iron. He would continue to do this throughout the forge, arranging even the trace elements of heavy metals with geometric precision. The canister was stubborn, refusing to come off. He took his chisel to it and then finally, as the metal was in danger of cooling down completely, just ripped it off with his bare hands.
The billet inside was mottled, showing the grains of the different metals he had put together. He checked for cold shuts, the flaws that presaged improper welds in the steel, but there were none, so he put the billet back in the forge. When it was bright orange again he took it out and started hammering it flat. Soon he fell into his normal rhythm, and the world contracted into the dull ache in his right arm, and the gentle heat of the forge, the warmth on his scales that felt like home.
When the billet was flattened into a long bar, he hammered the middle with his chisel and folded it over itself. Back into the forge for another round, heating, hammering flat, heating, folding, over and over, until he lost count of the layers. This was the old way of homogenizing the steel, getting rid of the impurities and spreading the carbon evenly throughout the metal to avoid overly soft or brittle spots. At the same time, he was nudging the metal with the field, lining up the trace elements of manganese, phosphorus, and nickel into pleasing shapes. If another eye could see the tesseracts inside, they would have called him an artist instead of a craftsman.
Finally, after many hours, his body was pleasantly exhausted and the sun was winding down over the horizon. The other forges in the commune had all winked out one by one, and everyone was already gathering in the longhouse to get out of the dangerous night air.
He let the billet cool and put it away with his tools. There was no thieving in such a small community. In any case, his Damascus was distinctive, better than the other stuff, sought after out in the city. He took no apprentices, and they thought him churlish for that. He was about to leave when he saw a shadow approaching, a cool wet wind, and the stench of the abyssal sea. A burly man came in a long coat, but the Dragon saw only fish, thousands of them crowded together, their eyes glistening, water coating them in a faint mist, an alien school in the shape of a human, the two forms coexisting somehow without negating each other. He had met this being before, once. His heart sank. This was neither fish nor man. This was an elder djinn. “Bahamut,” he said, throat parched. “You’re a long way from the sea.”
“This is a strange place you’ve picked.”
“It’s a place.” The Dragon shrugged.
“And you make knives.”
“I like the fire.”
“I see. Wasting your time.”
“Living in peace,” the Dragon said.
“Public service.” Bahamut sighed. “A concept entirely lost on the present generation. I cannot leave my demesne. I did tell you about the gate, didn’t I? The world on the other side, where your dear friend and mentor roams? The one you helped to free? All is not well there… The pilot sleeps in the gate, and he is most restless. Something comes our way, Dragon. Something…odd. There is Matteras, roaming free in the sky. There is Hazard, claiming the Earth. It behooves us to give answer.”
Matteras. His maternal uncle, oft called the uncrowned king of djinn, who hated him, had banished him to an underground hell for years. Then there was Hazard, the violent jackal-headed djinn who despised humans, who had sworn to kill him multiple times. The djinn world hated the Dragon, for he was an abomination twice over, born first as djinn-human hybrid, a stain upon Matteras’s family honor, and then remade once more below the earth into something worse, a half-dragon freak with custom-made eyes and wyrm DNA coiled through his body. He had been entangled since birth in djinn politics, and it had left him broken, burned, and shunned by all.
“That’s great,” the Dragon said. “Sounds like you have a lot of personal problems. I’m going to put away my tools, wash up, and go lie down. Then tomorrow I’m going to finish my knife. My buyer is coming next week and I’m behind. So please. Go away.”
“Ah well. Fine. I will commission a sword from you, then.”
“A what?”
“You are a blade maker, as you say. You have told me your schedule for tomorrow. Most admirable. I wish to make a sword.”
“Find another smith.”
“This sword requires the help of a djinn smith, one who has been trained by the Broken and is thus able to part molecules with the field. A singular blade is warranted. Again, a debt is owed. Your cousin misplaced the last such sword.”
“Rais?”
“Since you refuse to rescue him from Gangaridai, at least you can help to discharge his debts. It was your father’s sword, in fact, if that makes you feel better.”
“The cavalry blade? On our wall?”
“The very same. A most storied blade, now lost for all time through the carelessness of two Khan Rahman emissaries. You will make a replacement blade, an even grander one! A sword that cuts the field! A smiter of nanotech! It will need to be quenched in dragon flame to make it extra special.”
“That won’t do anything,” the Dragon objected.
“Extra special, I said!” Bahamut snapped. “It will sound better for the ballads. A sword quenched in dragon flame. That is not something to be scoffed at. It is part of the commission. I told you a singular blade is required. And you have here the only dragon in existence.”
“You’re going to keep bothering me until I do it, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to be left in peace.”
“No peace!”
“Okay,” the Dragon slumped. He knew that Bahamut would not leave him be.
“I will oversee your smithing. There are runes I wish to place inside the folds of the metal.”
“Great. Fine. I’ll do it, if you promise to leave immediately after it’s finished, and not come back for another seventy years,” the Dragon said. Arguing with the fish had always been a futile endeavor. “Wait a minute. Who’s going to use the sword?”
“Do not worry, it is not for you.”
“Who, then?”
“I am making a golem. Which reminds me, I will require your help for that as well.”
“A golem?”
“A lost soul like you, but filled with the rage necessary to survive the transformation.” Bahamut smiled unpleasantly. “We will need to quench him in dragon fire as well.”
“Really?”
“Dragon fire! He will wield the dread sword.”
“Fine. I’m glad you’ve found someone.”
Bahamut studied him with fishy eyes. “You never had enough rage in you, Dragon. Givaras did not choose well.”
“He worked with what he had.”
“Hmmm. The Maker was never that simple. Perhaps he made you soft for a reason.”
“I’m not soft, djinn,” the Dragon said. “I’m just bored with you.”
“We shall see.”
“And after these two boons, I’m done, right?”
“No,” Bahamut whispered under his fishy breath. “Not by a long shot.”
1The Lover
The Cyber Mage, Marzuk, was in love. Not cyber love, at which he was adept, but a real, physical, shot-in-the-gut kind of love that left him loopy and sleepless. She was sixteen, a year older than him, already filled out in astonishing curves, with the height and poise of a lady. Her hair was straight, black, and occasionally braided. Her skin was light brown, without a single blemish (to his eye). She was elegant, with that air of sophistication, that magic patina of charisma that just squashed every rational thought. He could not explain why he obsessed over her; that was the nature of his love.
Just looking at her from afar made him nauseated. The few times she crossed his path and stopped for a word, he had been unable to force out a single syllable. Silent and mysterious, that was Marzuk.
This and other weighty matters kept Marzuk boarded up in his room, or rather, his office. A good half of the space was given over to gaming equipment, where he normally played Final Fantasy 9000, which was, of course, the world game. More than 200 million users all across the globe, they said, probably a lot more among the undocumented canaille. Not too many on Marzuk’s level. The Cyber Mage only played games he could win.
Currently, his goblin avatar was brutalizing a bunch of noob peasants with a flamethrower. One might consider it unfair to bring a flamethrower to a sword-and-sorcery game, but he was a villain, and it was de rigueur for him to bend the rules. The game AI, Sakaguchi, barely tolerated him. Saka had investigated him a record nineteen times for infractions. Any ordinary player would have been banned for life by now, but there was a dearth of real villains in the game, and the Cyber Mage was something of a celebrity. In fact, not to be modest, he was famous all over the Virtuality, despite his anonymity. Last year he had been on the cover of FF9000 magazine, or his Goblin King avatar had, at any rate.
He fidgeted in his hideously expensive chair.. Good for his overweight ass. The surface layer was actually a cushion of air, a field maintained by electric manipulation of stacked carbon molecules. He was more floating than sitting. Sometimes he liked to lean back, crank up the hover, and pretend to be Baron Harkonnen from the old Dune movie. A cult classic, that. Marzuk was into cult classics. Given the paucity of actual live friends, his schedule was wide open for deep dives into ancient culture.
Babr the pygmy elephant snuffled near him, a questing trunk tapping his ankle. It was lunchtime. The elephant’s eyes were luminous, intelligent. With his trunk and his stylus, he could tap out simple applications on the screens. Right now he wanted food and some of his beloved narcotic berries. Marzuk got up and fed him. Slightly drunk, the elephant swayed to the discordant music of the game. Babr too had been hideously expensive. Marzuk had a lot of money because beneath his pudgy exterior, his mind was sharper than an orca’s teeth. (One did not think of orca teeth as particularly sharp, but they were!)
“Maru! Lunch!”
Maru. What a cringeworthy name. How typical of his mother to convert his gender and neatly infantilize him with one short syllable.
There was a chalk line drawn outside the corridor of his room. It was his line of emancipation. The notice, printed on heavy recycled paper and framed on the wall, said it clearly:
The individual Marzuk Dotrozi Khan Rahman born of so and so lineage, in the Square Multipurpose Hospital, on so and so date, resident of the Gulshan Fortified Diplomatic Enclave, with residency number X3488A3CPP, citizen of the Postflood Provisional Government of Bangladesh, Chop number 33345AA88, Shareholder of the Tri-State Corporation, Ordinary Status, is henceforth recognized by the provisional High Court to be legally emancipated from his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Dotrozi KR, with residency numbers etc., etc., respectively, and that this line drawn in permanent ink be a clear demarcation of his demesne within their joint lease holding. Furthermore, he is to be fully recognized as an independent entity in the eyes of the law, fully incorporated as a limited liability company unto himself, and as such, beneficiary of all associated legal ramifications. Signed, Dr. Yakub, Director of Security, Securex Inc.
It carried on in this vein for several pages, all of which were laminated, highlighted, and framed for easy perusal. Emancipated. Like fuck. Did his mother respect the line? NO, SHE DID NOT.
“Maru! Lunch!” Her voice was shrill. “And don’t forget to wash your hands!”
Wash my hands? Am I four? Do I need reminders for basic hygiene?
Halfway through lunch, his parents had already covered all the waffling conversation they had stored up. How was school, dear? How are your teachers? Where do you want to go for summer vacation? Blah, blah, blah. He reminded them several times that he was a) emancipated, b) gainfully employed, and c) not going to school, had not been for a rather long time. He really would prefer it if they treated him as a cool flatmate, rather than foisting on him this demeaning parent-child dynamic.
Papa just laughed fondly and patted Marzuk’s head, much as he had done for the past fifteen years. Sometimes he felt that his father was pulling his leg with the asinine questions, but when he looked at his vacant, innocent face he could see no sign of the necessary wit.
His mother sniffed tearfully at the emancipation bit (the legal notice had hit her hard) but then cheered up immediately when the kitchen unit announced that dessert was ready. The kitchen unit did excellent South Asian cuisine, and tolerable Chinese. Everything else was temperamental. Mama took great pride in feeding the family, even though she had very little to do with the actual preparation of food.
His parents always said that when they were growing up, kitchen units were just getting started, and more often than not, people employed human cooks. This was still done, of course, but mostly for ceremonial crap, or by gazillionaires. Marzuk, who didn’t see the point of eating together, or regular mealtimes, wondered idly why no one had yet created capsules to get rid of this whole messy process. It was tragically unjust that he, of all people, who clearly was not interested in food, happened to put on entire kilograms of weight just by sniffing the stuff. Then he realized that astronauts, surely, had these capsules. He made a mental note to order them online. Can’t have a conversation over a capsule, ha!
“So, son, college?” Papa said. “I’ve been getting a lot of mail from different places. That big tech university in Norway is very keen on you. They say they’ll give you a one-on-one professor.”
“I am the Cyber Mage!” Marzuk growled. “Papa, really, they are trying to con me into teaching their professors! Norway my ass! I’m not going to college unless they pay me. Do you think I’m a fool?”
“Son, there might be more to learn in life than computing,” Papa said lightly. He liked to pretend he knew stuff, but Marzuk was quite sure this was an act. Oldies always pretended there was useful shit they knew, but did they? What was it, then? How to fuck up the ecosphere? How to create rampant nanotech and ruin a perfectly good planet?
“Papa, actually, right now, I am backdoor hacked into the entire Tri-State security link. I can see from every public camera, and a large number of hidden ones. I have access to every petty bureaucrat’s office,” Marzuk said. “And the funny thing is, they don’t even have the capability to recognize this fact, let alone stop me. It’s like they’re running Kaspersky over there. Kaspersky.”
“Now, son, that sounds naughty,” his mother said. “Did you do your homework?”
“Homework?” Marzuk shrieked at an unreasonably high pitch. “Homework?!”
“Son, what exactly are you using the cameras to look at?” Papa said with some amusement, which gave Marzuk pause. The old man was sharp sometimes.
Look at? Why, there was only one thing worth looking at in the whole of Gulshan. Only one thing so perfect that it defied description. Amina.
Akramon Djibrel didn’t take prisoners. He took heads. Born into severely debilitating circumstances, just at the cusp of the great floods and fires, the so-called Disintegration Era, Djibrel had pretty much had to fend off all comers, including sexual predators, robbers, kidnappers, serial killers, organ hunters, and even cannibals. Also there were welfare workers, tree huggers, state services, religious orphanages, and other molesters of the idealistic variety.
His response to all transgressions had always been furious attack. In him was some long-dormant berserker gene that transformed his small, wiry childhood frame into a spitting, biting, hacking dervish who seemed to hate every living thing. He had grown since then into an apex predator, honed by the pressures of the rabble. Crime was unregulated among the cardless, the great sea of people who surrounded the city, and armed men and women made their own laws like the sheriffs of old. There were mech suits, powered armor straight from the pages of anime. There were drone halos controlled by the mind, exotic tech marbles that could tear through flesh like paper. Finally, there were swords.
Djibrel had a talwar—a singular weapon. It was single-edged, with a six-degree curve in the blade. The hilt had a simple cross guard with a knuckle bow, a small band of metal that protected the fingers from getting chopped off. The pommel was a flanged disk sporting a four-inch spike, useful for punching people in the face in close quarters. A hole in the pommel allowed a leather thong to be attached to the wrist, preventing loss of the weapon during moments of stress. In Djibrel’s line of work there were always moments of stress.
It looked like a relic of the Mughal era, a weapon reminiscent of the sabers used by the Turkic horse peoples of Central Asia, closely related to the Persian shamsher, the Turkish kilij, and the Afghan pulwar. The great Mughal Babur, most famed of conquerors, might well have worn this weapon on his belt. The sword bore no maker’s mark. There was no scrollwork or jewel in the hilt, no mother of pearl on the scabbard, but the blade itself conveyed its pedigree, the peculiar watery mark of Wootz steel, the priceless rose-and-ladder pattern etched in metal that purveyors of weapons all through the Middle Ages knew as Damascene.
If, in fact, this were a genuine Wootz steel blade from the Middle Ages, it would have belonged in a museum or in the hands of some avid collector, easily worth more than Djibrel’s entire life’s income, more, in fact, than the entire GDP of the slum he hailed from.
The blade was sharpened to a monomolecular edge, which was translucent, so that the very hairsbreadth of the cutting side was invisible. Edges this sharp had hitherto been possible only in obsidian blades, but those tended to be brittle and shatter easily. The makers of this blade had done something to ensure that the edge self-repaired to some extent, and moreover maintained an unlikely toughness, thus ensuring that the weapon did not face ruin after the first cut.
The sword was used, almost exclusively, for cutting off heads. Cutting off heads was necessary in the slums due to the rampant nanotech available. Bullets didn’t kill people with the same finality they used to. In the Mirpur area, where Djibrel currently roamed, there were continuous twenty-story habitations that created one great longhouse, with passages through, and tunnels, and other covered roads high and low; these passages were also rented out to the needy, so actual traversable pathways mutated according to daily or weekly lease agreements. The roads on the ground, long-ago municipal routes of durable concrete, had been claimed for living space, filled up with lean-tos, tents, and steel structures. The roofs often boasted illegal kitchen gardens, rapidly evolving plants living in symbiosis with the nanite-infected air. Everything was mutable, for a plethora of cheap 3-D printers were available and enough expertise existed here to create any number of unlikely structures, most of them composed of dubious raw materials, some of them entirely from raw sewage, so that the term “living in a shit house” was made literal.
There was a grand, snakelike bazaar, where trade was untaxed and free, as long as you had the muscle to back it up. The Mirpur zone was a quarantined area, meaning the three million people squeezed into it were not legally allowed to leave. They had once been the citizens of the country known as Bangladesh, but the whole nature of nationhood had changed, splintered down into fiefdoms effectively ruled by private city corporations. They were now allegedly citizens of the Dhaka City Corporation, some of them with single shares in either the DCC or Mirpur Inc., with the accompanying privileges. Many had no shares, however, and these were effectively nonpeople, though still essential for population density, which is why the city fed them and let them stay inside the borders.
Much of the city was like this, outside of the privileged enclaves like Dhanmondi or the Tri-State, which protected their exclusivity with maximum force. Of course, the Tri-State was incorporated and anyone living within had shareholder status—actual valuable shares. This meant they counted. As actual people. They had equity in the world.
“Force” was really the key word everywhere in Bangladesh, but pretty much definitively in Dhaka City. Many do-gooders were attracted to this region to observe firsthand the massive concentration of 30 million people in an area the size of a postage stamp, and once in Dhaka, astonished by the sheer scale of inhumanity, they often sat paralyzed with confusion and mounting dread. A few of them tried to help, which was even worse.
Many such cases of help included the use of illegal health-grade nanotech. Ingested in water, in food, dispersed into the air—Mirpur had been dosed liberally, as had most other zones. Many of the tech caused cancer, disfigurement, often hideous death. Still, it made bodies invulnerable: to disease, to injury, to starvation even. There were some people in Mirpur who could survive on water puddles and air, thanks to nanotech in their bodies working miracles. There were other people who could survive otherwise-fatal gunshot wounds, because nanotech in their bodies knit up severed arteries, repaired heart or brain tissue in seconds. There was no one, however, who survived having their head cut off.
Djibrel stalked through Mirpur number 10, passing through the road-bazaar, where he was somewhat known and generally avoided. He had a sword, and he had his shotgun, ...
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